Benjamin Strange

New Orleans, LA

I am a guitar tech and founder of Strange Guitarworks. I am a fairly decent bassist and a pretty lousy guitarist. I create experimental music under the moniker of UFO Death Cult, utilizing microtonal instruments of my own design (which are always pink, for some reason). I also practice Shotokan Karate, so look out man!

Author's posts

Most people think of the truss rod as the smoking gun regarding an instrument’s playability. Action too high? Tighten the truss rod. Action too low? Loosen the truss rod. This kind of advice runs rampant on forums all over the internet, and it’s dead wrong. Guitar necks have an optimal relief of between .1mm (.004″) …

On September 1st, 2012, Strange Guitarworks was born. It doesn’t seem like that long ago – this has been so much fun that I’ve hardly noticed that five whole years have slipped by. To be honest, I don’t really know exactly how to remark upon this admittedly small, but perhaps significant milestone. When I consider …

Our friend, Mr. PH Fred, always has the oddest guitars, and the oddest requests for modifications of those guitars. Last time, he had us turn an acoustic guitar into a Stratocaster (check it out here: Elvis Meets Nixon). This time, he made what seemed like a pretty easy request, to install a Lollar Charlie Christian …

The most requested document from the National Archives isn’t the Bill of Rights, nor even the Constitution – it’s this photo: Elvis meets Nixon. Yeah, it really happened. A bizarre moment in American history, to be sure – and one that inspired a madcap project here in our shop. Some background: one of our regular …

I have an oft-repeated mantra at the shop: “Intonation is a social construct”. Over the last several hundred years, western music has largely standardized into an equal tempered system, dividing the octave into twelve notes with a ratio equal to the 12th root of 2 (12√2 = 2 1⁄12 ≈ 1.059463)(12 tone equal temperament is also known as …

No doubt many of us will be glad to put 2016 behind us. This has been a wild year for our world, our nation, our city, and even our tiny little space at Strange Guitarworks. While we know 2016 has been full of negativity and loss outside of the shop’s walls, inside we have striven to …

Building a great acoustic guitar is tricky business. One has to find the perfect balance between two opposing ideas: build a guitar that sounds good, or build a guitar that lasts. If the guitar is too solidly built, it won’t have any resonance and will sound terrible; if the guitar is too flimsy, it will collapse …

We are proud to announce that we are now an official dealer for Jim Dunlop strings! We restring a LOT of guitars, and we’ve found Dunlop strings to be among our favorites. They’re built really well, are extremely consistent, are generously long (handy for long scale & hollow body instruments), made in America, and the …

We have the greatest job in the world: we play with guitars all day, and oftentimes get our grubby mitts on vintage instruments that we wouldn’t ever get to see as mere mortals. Occasionally we see vintage gear that looks almost brand new, but most times when an older instrument comes into our shop it …